The growth of the ‘eviction economy’

“Eviction, which used to be rare in this country and used to draw crowds, has become frankly common place in poor neighborhoods,” Harvard sociologist, Matthew Desmond, told To the Point. Desmond is the author of the new book, “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” which looks at the relationship between landlords and tenants who can’t pay the rent.

“We have reached a point today where the majority of poor renting families are spending at least half of their income on housing costs, and at least one in four are spending over 70 percent of their incomes just on rent and utilities,” he said.

“There are literally hundreds of data mining companies that collect eviction records and sell them to landlords,” he added. “There are lawyers who specialize in carrying out eviction orders, so yeah there’s a lot of folks who have come along to triage the fallout or the wreckage we’ve tolerated because we have such an acute housing crisis.”